An Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) is a blueprint for a service-based, enterprise-scale business applications solution, which that offers increased levels of adaptability, flexibility, and openness required to reduce total cost of ownership. ESA combines the legacy of the best experience in enterprise applications with the flexibility of Web services and other open standards. In a present example, the NetWeaver platform developed by SAP of Walldorf Germany is a technical foundation for an Enterprise Services Architecture.
ESA elevates the design, composition, and deployment of Web services to an enterprise level to address business requirements. An enterprise service is typically a series of Web services combined with simple business logic that can be accessed and used repeatedly to support a particular business process. Aggregating Web services into business-level enterprise services provides more meaningful building blocks for the task of automating enterprise-scale business scenarios.
Enterprise services provides a platform in which to efficiently develop composite applications, which are applications that compose functionality and information from existing systems to support new business processes or scenarios. All enterprise services communicate using Web services standards, can be described in a central repository, and are created and managed by tools provided by an ESA platform. With an ESA platform, companies have a cost-effective blueprint for composing innovative new applications by extending existing systems, while maintaining a level of flexibility that makes future process changes cost-effective.
The goal of ESA notwithstanding, present ESA tools lack intuitive mechanisms to adapt basic services to particular customer needs. In particular, what is needed is a design time support tool for customer-specific adaptation of business process services and applications.